I can't see Hitchcock and Montgomery Clift meshing together well...it'd be like Kubrick working with Brando. Just very different styles, and I'm not surprised the film doesn't really work, for whatever reasons.
"Hitchcock would remark how difficult it was to work with actors like...Jimmy Stewart." Is that true? For all the intensity of Stewart's later-career performances, he wasn't some pansy Method actor, he was old school like Cary Grant, which is why Hitchcock used the two of them so frequently. (They were the best of the best, good for different things.) Hitchcock thought of his actors like lights: he just wanted to set them up, turn them on, and have them do what he wanted them to do, without bugging him about the psychological subtext. I always thought Jimmy Stewart was a great lightbulb.
Clayton L. White
· 2 years ago
Yeah, I always heard that Hitchcock had some animosity towards Stewart. They always got along, I'm sure, but I think Stewart didn't like being the lightbulb. He was old school for sure, but he was much more of an "actor" than someone like Cary Grant. That's why Stewart's performances were the best in all of Hitchcock's work. Grant just turned on the charm, and he was great at that, but I think Stewart liked to dig deeper, and I think it annoyed Hitchcock a little.
francisco lopes
· 2 years ago
"I confess" is a very good film, and I think that some Hitchcock´s fans are unfair on treating it as a minor one. The photography is superb, Clift is full of inner life (if there´s an actor with this argueable thing, it´s him for sure) and even Anne Baxter has a good moment as his impossible love affair. But the strongest force in screen is O.E Hesse, with those eyes and that avid desire of doing wrong to the priest, to ruin him, in curious contradiction with his gratitude. A good Hitchcock, unhappily a little forgotten.
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"Hitchcock would remark how difficult it was to work with actors like...Jimmy Stewart." Is that true? For all the intensity of Stewart's later-career performances, he wasn't some pansy Method actor, he was old school like Cary Grant, which is why Hitchcock used the two of them so frequently. (They were the best of the best, good for different things.) Hitchcock thought of his actors like lights: he just wanted to set them up, turn them on, and have them do what he wanted them to do, without bugging him about the psychological subtext. I always thought Jimmy Stewart was a great lightbulb.
The photography is superb, Clift is full of inner life (if there´s an actor with this argueable thing, it´s him for sure) and even Anne Baxter has a good moment as his impossible love affair. But the strongest force in screen is O.E Hesse, with those eyes and that avid desire of doing wrong to the priest, to ruin him, in curious contradiction with his gratitude.
A good Hitchcock, unhappily a little forgotten.